Architecture Stuff

CONTENTS

7 Acknowledgments 8

Foreword by Jeffrey Kipnis

12 Introduction 14

Similarity and Difference: SANAA’s Grace Farms River Building

30

Shoehorning the Site: Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’Ava

46

As a Consequence: Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

66

Piling It On: Vanna Venturi House

86

Primordial Presence: Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum

104

Whirring Bits: Chareau’s Maison de Verre

126 Gulp:

Hawkmoor’s St. George’s Bloomsbury 150 Credits 152 Biography

FOREWORD By Jeffrey Kipnis

Before I say anything else, I must say this: Architecture Stuff is not an easy read, even for someone well versed in reading architectural analysis. That said, I should also say that it is not much more difficult for a beginner with a strong interest in architecture than for a pro. The difficulties arise because Rob Livesey does not aspire simply to “explain” the works he considers. That is, he does not seek to answer the predictable questions that would satisfy the curiosity about the works that might be expected of a reader. Livesey has something very different in mind, far more intriguing and original.

Were I to have been asked to write a cover blurb for Rob Livesey’s Architecture Stuff rather than these introductory remarks, I would have tendered this: I’d stake my reputation that, upon reading Livesey’s account of his or her work in these pages, the reaction of the architect would go something like this: “Well, I won’t argue his analysis is ingenious as far as it goes, and, true enough, sometimes he even approaches my own thinking, but on balance he fails to grasp my overall concept entirely.” And to that plaint I expect Livesey might well respond, “Exactly! It’s not that I fail to grasp anything. It’s just that I am not so interested in the Big Idea.”

Exactly. As the readers of Architecture Stuff will discover, the fascinations that drive this book are with exquisite episodes and partial relationships more than consummate totalities. Setting aside the original architect’s agenda and means, Livesey instead concentrates on his own favorite instances of exceptional architectural play-craft in each work. Nothing makes Livesey’s distraction from the original architectural intentions more obvious than the perverse list of projects he considers canonic works by Hawksmoor, Stirling, Koolhaas, SANAA, Venturi, Kahn, and Chareau. Each of these works is already well-recognized within the discipline for the power of its cultural concept and the consummate success of the architectural incarnation. Yet, on the other hand, those seven cultural concepts are, at the very least, discomfited by one another, if not downright antagonistic. Kahn, Koolhaas, and Chareau, aligned? I don’t think so. Throw in SANAA??? Fuhgeddaboudit!!!! If each on its own offers a transcendent architectural aria of a worldview, throw them together into the same revue and they make for a lively but chaotic collection of immeubles-vivant, a burlesque in architecture of this unsettled world.

Now, some care must be exercised here, for the point here is not to claim that Livesey is blasé about coherent works of architecture whose internal concinnity serves a larger idea. Were that to have been the case, his chosen examples for consideration

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would likely have been very different. At least since the mid-’60’s, a substantial body of important architectural works—ranging from those of established masters such as Rossi, Gehry, and Moss to relative newcomers such as Diller+Scofidio and MOS— have challenged the bona fides of the ancient ethos that some palpable sensibility resonates throughout an architectural work and grants it organic unity.

If for millennia the means of achieving such resonance were limited to formal typology or traditional materiality and ornamentation, today the catalog of architectural instruments is immeasurably larger. Advances in building materials, structural systems, and construction methods have dramatically expanded the palette of the architect to be sure, but far more important to the dramatic explosion of design variation in the 20th century has been the emergence of new clienteles for the art form and consequent new audiences for its performances. Today, organic resonance achieved by pictorialism, combinatorial logic, quotation, collage, or allusions augment the venerable catalog of form, materiality, and ornament, as do a dizzying array of other design tactics that range from familiar to exotic to esoteric.

In this volume, Koolhaas (OMA) and SANAA, two architectural practices with close affinities, provide stark evidence as one compares the drama of differences between Grace Farms and Villa dall’Ava, divided by only 20 years, and then, in turn, compare these to Hawksmoor’s struggle in form and material in an attempt to unite disparate architectural liturgical types three centuries earlier. Thus, it is hard to image how—or why—one would want to consider them in any other way?

If at first Livesey’s analysis of Grace Farms seems almost too dutiful in its deference to the instructions of the building offered by SANAA architect Ryue Nishizawa to attend the landscape as the generator (though do not be fooled, close attention to Livesey’s brief discussion lands on at least one issue that neither the architect nor any other critic bother to consider!), by the next work, Koolhaas’s Villa dall’Ava, the excursion from the architect’s own account and the accumulated critical literature of exegesis could not be more dramatic. Where others see quotation, collage, the dissolution of the nuclear family union, the glorification of mechanicals (sliding doors), and ironic games with urban versus rural/pastoral tropes (e.g., construction fences and swimming pools versus rooftop gardens), Livesey sees only two elements: “walls” and a garden.

To demonstrate just how far Livesey strays in his Koolhaas analysis from the norm, allow me to call attention to but one subtlety that scents Livesey’s argument, one apparent gaff that that might easily be missed or even misunderstood as a serious error.

He references only Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier as the work’s predecessors.

Philip Johnson is omitted entirely, even though the Johnson Glass House is the most completely quoted element in the Villa dall’Ava; it sticks out like a sore thumb. If, as is standard today, one considers Corb’s Villa Savoye, Mies’s Farnsworth House, and

9

Johnson’s Glass House as dall’Ava’s trio of precedents—leading to a very easy case for a collage argument and Koolhaas swerve to the urban and mechanical—then something is very wrong with Livesey’s omission. On the other hand, if one wants to push attention away from that obvious collage reading toward, well, gardens and walls, then the superior antecedents of the Villa are better conceived of as Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul (a giant wall!) and Mies’s Resor House, whose dumbbell symmetry and inside/outside-space/garden relationship is made thematic explicitly. Hence, for Livesey’s analyses, these are the only two influences, and, though it is essential that he note a heritage by naming the two architects, it is just as important that he not identify them as images or tropes.

That is why, to grasp the full force of Livesey’s arguments, the opposite is true: he requires the works he takes on to maintain full allegiance to the tradition of the organic whole. This is because he himself is committed to it, but also because his goal in this book is not to give us deeper insights into these particular works (as a historian or critic might desire), even if his analyses do offer original interpretations. In my opinion, the ambition and struggle of this volume is toward a worthier, more liberating ambition: to give us deeper insights into how he, as an architect, thinks about his discipline and designs new works. One senses that in this ambition a conviction that Architecture Stuff strives to broach a more honest, general, non-verbal model for how most—if not all—architects work, a model whose generative capacity and history of success suggests that it deserves to be elevated to the status of a theory in its own right, even if such a position struggles to be told.

In the end, the greater consequence of Livesey’s exercise is to make a compelling if personal case for revisiting the idea of an independent architectural intelligence, one that is neither autonomous and independent of external influences, nor best understood in terms of history, theory, criticism, structural engineering, or material sciences, though these and other disciplines are always implicated in that intelligence, just as science, history, and grammar are always implicated in philosophy. What else, after all, could Nietzsche have meant when he wrote, “I fear we are not rid of God, because we still have faith in grammar.”

His declaration of independence revives and updates a radical proposition, almost sotto voce, that the “brains” behind this distinct type of intelligence are to be found wholly in an architectural eye, here understood not as a metonymy, but as an actuality: a specially evolved and trained bodily organ complex (which would likely need to include eyes, hands, skin, and legs at least) that bypasses, almost as an instinct, the traditionally understood path of artistic apprehension: that is, one that would first see like a camera and then report that sensation to the brain for verbal understanding and later to the mind for interpretation.

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It is a radical proposition to be sure, but not as ridiculous as one might think. In the great writings on art, one finds more or less explicit allusions to it in Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. The great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze took it seriously enough to suggest a grounding of it at a biological level in his writings on the painter Francis Bacon.

And Livesey himself gives us a small clue—so small that I suspect many will miss its significance—that this notion of an architectural eye, however one may want to name it, is not just my hysterical concoction as an interpretation of his work, but is indeed, in some sense or another, the very desire he wishes to express in this work, the one that causes it to come into existence and colors its every page.

In Livesey’s own introduction, there is a brief mention of the now obscure but once-renowned 19th-century art theorist Konrad Fiedler. To my great embarrassment of ignorance and great joy of discovery, until I read the name in this text, I had never heard of him; he is almost never mentioned by art writers or philosophers who, I now believe, should celebrate his work today. It is understandable that Livesey would want to reference him, because Fiedler first put forth the notion of Pure Visibility in which the entire content of a work of art was grasped in its seeing. Obviously, the idea is very similar in rudimentary form to the implication of Livesey’s conjecture today, though the latter is far more provocative and livelier than that of his predecessor.

Which, therefore, is why the conclusion in the form of More Stuff is so central to the argument. Though separated from the main text and analyses like chaff from grain and styled as a mere pamphlet appendix or apologetic afterthought, it is, in fact, the climax of the work. For in these few select projects by Livesey, we see a consummate demonstration of the principle of the architectural eye engaged in production. Each project is made of the very same stuff that he has carved out of the masterworks he has analyzed, yet not one is made of any part of them or any other easily recognizable episode.

At the beginning I warned: Architecture Stuff is not an easy read. Now you know why.

How could it be, when its very message is that what must be grasped is essentially non-verbal! Yet, as one who is nothing but verbal, I offer this assurance: reading it, working through its diagrams and analyses is worth the effort. Doing so with care and close attention is to make an investment of hours that will engender a growth in architectural intelligence for both readers of architecture and producers of architecture that will yield returns for years.

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INTRODUCTION

This book is about architecture stuff.

Architecture Stuff has to do with being curious about why things are the way that they are, as in, “What is this stuff?” It also has to do with projecting possibilities, as in, “What can we do with this stuff?” More a working method than a theory, Architecture Stuff deals with questions that are pertinent to designers as well as critics of buildings. It deploys observation, interpretation, and invention in equal measure in order to produce a palpable density of ideas.

When it first entered the English language in the 14th century as a noun, stuff referred to the quilted material worn under chain mail. Soon after, it came to be associated with equipment and furniture. As a verb, this word derives from an older word, stuffen, meaning “to furnish, supply, or cram.” This history is useful in unpacking the term. Architecture Stuff is concerned with material that resides below the surface and points to the more malleable organizational underpinnings of the discipline. The resonance of the term with equipment and furniture relates to a focus on architecture’s discrete elements and components, while stuffing aligns with seeing architecture as a dense fabric of relationships produced through transitive action and inventive embellishment.

In a disciplinary context as crammed with jargon as architecture is, some might quibble with the informality of architecture stuff, but such a perceived casualness is important for several reasons. Architecture stuff is unpretentious, accessible, contemporary, and sometimes humorous. It suggests variety and quantity, but not opulence. In the best cases each element is in several relationships at the same time; hierarchy is variable and fluid. Architecture stuff is not an attempt to suggest a lack of disciplinary focus or dearth of authenticity, but to point out the fact that a degree of play is in effect.

An important aspect of stuff is that it generalizes. Action can be related to elements; experience is the same as space. Whatever is found or collected in a bedside drawer is fair game.

Architecture stuff is fueled by looking at things: the more you see, the more you get. It can be applied to any building. Architecture stuff is not particularly interested in narrative or storytelling; it is concerned with consequences. If this, then what? The game of consequences—both logical and illogical—comes from Konrad Fiedler’s idea of perceptual cognition, where certain forms of understanding are only visual.

As such, architecture stuff is a particular way of looking at architecture. Economy of gesture (more stuffed into less) is important. Architecture stuff addresses the mun-

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ARCHITECTURE STUFF

dane and is not afraid of the literal. It is anti-branding and anti-fetish. It allows for specificity without certainty. It encourages the episodic and eclectic and embraces humor as a way of not taking itself too seriously. By necessity it is fixed, but its stasis is fleeting.

Rather than rehearse tired dichotomies between form and space or object buildings and urban fabric, architecture stuff operates beneath the fray rather than above it. As others today debate architecture’s politics (see criticality), ethics (see sustainability), and technical potentialities (see digital processes and fabriaction), architecture stuff attends to that which is irreducibly disciplinary. Politics, ethics, and technology—however important—cannot make architecture by themselves. More stuff is required.

As the story goes, the industrial revolution killed the craft of architecture in order to give the multitude plenty. Today, some architects and designers promise a facsimile of lost craft with endless scripted variations. But the pleasure of craft does not lie in the elements themselves; the pleasure of craft emerges from the density of the relationships within and among the parts being used. Mass produced variation is a bore.

Architecture Stuff demonstrates other ways to access the pleasures of craft. It sanctions the promiscuousness and invention that exist in the making of relationships. It welcomes the marriage of one-off customization with off-the-shelf componentry. It knits disparate elements together without reducing their inherent complexities and it unravels familiar configurations in favor of novel organizational possibilities. Architecture stuff counters the empty veneer of blindly fabricated variation by exposing a profuse depth of relationships within any building, and here considers examples

by Nicholas Hawksmoor, Pierre Chareau, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, James Stirling, Rem Koolhaas, and SANAA. These buildings are not chosen for their allegiance to any stylistic or ideological categorization, but for their demonstrable intelligence, density of detail, and wit. In other words, they are chosen for their breadth of architectural approaches and because they are good examples of architecture stuff.

INTRODUCTION

13

Fig. 14

The idea of conjugation is thematic in SANAA’s work. The lights at Grace Farms are a good example. There are four essential types: recessed, exposed can, ellipsoid, and tubular. The recessed lights are most evident in the gymnasium (see Fig. 14), though they also exist in a reduced form in the ceiling of the tearoom and in all of the service spaces. In even further-reduced form, the recessed lights are manifest in the up-lights of the paving below the roof (see Fig. 12) and act as emergency exit lights in the risers of the exterior fire stairs. In the auditorium, cans hang from the ceiling to provide the primary lighting. (see Fig. 13) Those cans are found again as track lighting in the library and on the columns at several points along the walkway, providing pools of light for pavilion entrances and clusters of outdoor furniture. The ellipsoid lights provide the primary lighting for the dining hall as chandeliers that hang from the ceiling, but they can also be found as standard lights in the library, tearoom, and sitting area of the dining pavilion. The tubular lights have the same form as the track lighting in the library but are found as circles that define a separate dining area (Fig. 15) and as the lighting source for the reflective Double Glass River installation by Teresita Fernåndez. (Fig. 16) The River building appears to be a simple edifice. It is a canopy supported by thin columns that follows the contours of a site while sheltering a series of pavilions. The fact that it is made of a limited palette of materials contributes to its singular image, but it is how those materials are layered to appear and disappear with respect to one another that creates a wide range of experiences. The structure aligned with the glass wall is a constant in the public pavilions. In the auditorium and library, curtains are added to allow for the control of lighting levels. The ceilings of the auditorium and gymnasium exist in contrast to one another. The ceiling of the auditorium is cacophonous with its

SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

23

double-strut truss, hanging can lights, and circular bars for stage lights (see Fig. 13), while the ceiling for the gymnasium is more sedate with its single-strut truss and recessed lights. (see Fig. 14) The material palette for the floors is equally selective. In the auditorium, the primary floor is concrete and the stage is wood. In the gymnasium, the primary floor is wood and the gallery floor is concrete. The other pavilions follow suit, with the library floor finished in wood and the restaurant finished in concrete. There are two anomalies in the pattern: the sitting area in the dining pavilion is finished in stone pavers and the tearoom is carpeted. Each material has a particular effect on the character of its respective space.

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

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ARCHITECTURE STUFF

A similar situation exists front to back (or east-to-west). The front yard is half the depth of the back yard. But if the entrance hall/interior garden is part of the larger garden scheme, then there is equivalence between the front and rear yards. (Fig. 14) Placing the house in the middle of the site could be seen as establishing the house as the initial object to be acted upon. Every action after the initial placement is in response to the context, program, or architect’s intent. One of those actions is the alignment of the street pavilion with the south neighbor’s house, while a following action is the shifting of the back (garden) pavilion beyond the north neighbor’s house. (Fig. 15) The result reinforces the distinction between the urban front pavilion as compressed, contextual, and aligned, and the rear garden pavilion as free from such obligations.

X

X

X

X

Fig. 14

N

Fig. 15

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ARCHITECTURE STUFF

Fig. 3

Colin Rowe argued that the Staatsgalerie has no elevation. In fact, it has two front elevations. The first is the wrapped courtyard elevation with an exaggerated cornice. The second elevation is more complex. The sheer ends of the galleries establish a surface, but few elements are in the same plane. The terrace attached to the theater is pulled out and holds the objects together with their stone material. Rowe is correct in that the trees somewhat blur this image, but there is little doubt that the combination of objects have an elevation-like presence on Konrad-Adenauer Strasse. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4

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ARCHITECTURE STUFF

Fig. 11

EQ EQ

SERVED

SERVICE

EQ

EQ

Fig. 12

EQ

EQ

Fig. 13

112 ARCHITECTURE STUFF

If the entrance hall and the stair are pushed to one side, then the doctor’s suite arrayed along the garden facade is organized and pushed in the opposite direction. (see Fig. 2) The narrow passage to the receptionist’s office from the waiting area makes it appear as if the room has been moved or compressed. The curved wall on one side of the room is another indication of the adjacent forces. The stair to the doctor’s study above suffers the effects of the imposition of the apartment stair. Finally, there is the glass block wall that has been pushed into the doctor’s consulting room. (Fig. 14)

Fig. 14

If on the first floor there was any doubt about parts being in motion, then the second floor could not be more overt about it. (Fig. 15) As on the first floor, there is shifting from side to side. The primary stair landing projects into the main salon and leaves a trace of the stair’s former location in the main salon. The stair to the upper apartment shifts into and compresses the salon. The library shelves that wrap around the corner support the impact of the apartment stair. In addition, the apartment stair has shifted

WHIRRING BITS 113

the columns, setting up an axis from the middle bedroom door to the front facade. If the apartment stair were to be pushed back out of the space, there would be a consistent span between the two freestanding columns and the column next to the shelving.

(Fig. 16) In the vertical direction, the columns appear to stretch upwards with what could rightly be referred to as column spacers: heavily riveted and painted orange on the outside of the flange. (Fig. 17)

4

3

5

1

2

6

SECOND FLOOR

N

1. STAIR LANDING 2. SALON 3. DOCTOR’S STUDY 4. DAY ROOM 5. DINING 6. KITCHEN Fig. 15

114 ARCHITECTURE STUFF

Fig. 1

126 ARCHITECTURE STUFF

GULP: HAWKSMOOR’S ST. GEORGE’S BLOOMSBURY “It is a work that has a kind of simplicity, ease, and density of detail that only a filmmaker in total command of his craft can bring off, and then only rarely.”

- Vincent Canby

There is little question that Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George’s Bloomsbury is considered a masterpiece. (Fig. 1) Begun in 1716 and completed in 1731, it has recently been restored to its original state, making it ripe for review.

Notwithstanding its significance to architectural history, St. George’s represents a formidable command of craft. It is a game of logical consequences in which Hawksmoor uses program and context (both physical and cultural) as muses to manipulate the very stuff of architecture. Though it plays out in classical garb, it remains relevant to contemporary discourse. A cornice, for present purposes, is just another name for a horizontal line. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

GULP 127

St. George’s is a pile of classical references and the intersection of church and state— of the sacred and profane. The obvious combination of a steeple church and classical temple is well known, but it is the canny inventiveness with which the two buildings are merged that makes it noteworthy.

At the most basic level, the church is composed of three elements: steeple, hall, and apse. (Fig. 3) Hinting at the complexities to come, the temple is composed of three gabled pieces with temple fronts at either end of a higher, central mass. (Fig. 4) Reading the hall as a temple, we notice its orientation along a civic axis from south to north. It’s a composition of columns and thin walls, and the fragmentary, horizontal, and extended character of its elements. The church intersects the temple along a perpendicular liturgical axis from west to east, or steeple to apse, and is composed of arched forms, thick walls, and vertical, compressed elements. (Figs. 5 & 6) Both the church and the temple have stacked windows and share the central space.

However, the windows on the south and north elevations are far more narrowly spaced than their counterparts on the west and east elevations. (Fig. 7) This also gives the impression that the temple windows are spreading apart and that those of the church are subject to a contrasting compression. Though the cubic volume of the central space suggests an equivalence between church and temple, the strong contrast between their elements—thick, arched, windowed, and vertical church walls versus thin, columned, open, and horizontal temple walls—makes their differences abundantly clear.

TEMPLE

CHURCH Fig. 3

128 ARCHITECTURE STUFF

Fig. 4